The devastating effects of illness on an elderly couple are brilliantly portrayed by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Photo:

The devastating effects of illness on an elderly couple are brilliantly portrayed by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

The devastating effects of illness on an elderly couple are brilliantly portrayed by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant. (
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It’s the opening shot of the year: a head-on view of battering rams, as the French police crash into a locked apartment. They move in, and as the camera lights on a corpse laid out on a bed, there’s the title card — “Amour.”

From there the film flashes back to Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a pair of elderly, well-to-do Parisians attending a concert on their last night as an ordinary couple. As they have breakfast the next morning, Anne suddenly becomes unresponsive, eyes wide open while her husband vainly asks her to speak. It’s the first sign of what will be her final illness. Death is toying with them, quietly announcing its presence via the most dread-inducing running water since Janet Leigh turned on the taps in “Psycho.”

Austrian director Michael Haneke takes us through each stage of Anne’s deterioration, using long, elegant takes to tell this harsh story. After the first episode, we never see the events that drain Anne, only their effects.

But the title is a lifeline to the audience, and not an irony. The young, beautiful lovers that Riva once played in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” and Trintignant in “A Man and a Woman” are still visible in their faces and superb performances. As the director keeps his camera on Riva while the nurse is changing her diaper, what’s evoked is not pity or disgust, but Anne’s still-strong emotions, locked inside a treacherous body. And while the end is known, the suspense remains: How can she bear it? How will her husband bear it?

All great films have imagination; this one also has the sense of experience. Haneke, who turned 70 this year, is famed for an astringent — some have said merciless — style. “Amour,” while relentless, has compassion not only for the couple’s struggles and isolation, but also for the fumbling of outsiders. Other people mean well, but they’re from a world where death remains offstage.

Isabelle Huppert, a serious contender for the world’s greatest living actress, plays Anne and Georges’ daughter, who refuses to believe that her efficiency and intelligence are not useful in this fight. A brilliant former piano pupil of Anne’s arrives to pay tribute, and instead brings agonizing reminders of the music she will never play again. And there’s the kindly neighbor who congratulates Georges on how well he’s doing; Georges is doing well only in the sense that he’s continuing. As Georges says, “It will go steadily downhill for a while, and then it will be over.”

“Amour” has earned so much praise since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the spring that some may fear it’s overhyped. It is not.